A review by robinwalter
Winter and Rough Weather by D.E. Stevenson

lighthearted relaxing medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

 This was an interesting read, and a somewhat conflicting one. I scored it 4/5 which means that overall I liked it quite a bit, and there was a lot to like. The two characters who for me were the leads especially. The newly married Rhoda and her protégé Duggie. Stevenson made them both very likeable and she wrote about them with the sort of deep affection that is also evident in her descriptions of the book’s  other main character - the Scottish Borders where the story is set. The story is basically sweet and straightforward, in the end good things happen to good people, and bad people get what they deserve - in a civilised low-key fashion of course. So, what's not to like? 

 

In a review of a book by Stevenson's neighbour Molly Clavering, I mentioned that in several of Stevenson's works there were glimpses of what I called misogyny. This story presented considerable evidence of that attitude. Perhaps the most egregious example is the way in which Duggie's mother is described 

 

Lizzie was rather a stupid woman 

 

"Stupid" is a harsh pejorative, and toward the end of the book when we find out why she is so described (at which point she has been upgraded from stupid to "silly"), it's clear that it was poor judgement compounded by a lack of life experience and the trauma of being a very young mother during wartime. Her actions are described in this way: 

 

“Silly people are often cruel,” said Adam. “You know that yourself. People with no imagination are cruel because they don’t realise what other people are suffering.” 

 

What makes the charge of misogyny relevant here is that we learn that her husband made decisions which were at least almost  as ill-thought-out and “selfish”, but he is not criticised at all. Instead he is viewed as the innocent victim of his wife's "stupidity", "silliness", "selfishness", when the key decisions they each took separately were remarkably alike. The woman is the villain, the man is the victim. 

 

The very first instance of this misogyny that really caught my eye in the story was the one that follows: 

 

Rhoda had imagined—most foolishly as she now perceived—that painting was a more important career than marriage 

 

When I read that, the troglodytic mindset that displayed did annoy me, but I was also amused by a contrast that occurred to me immediately. Ngaio Marsh created a character who was a gifted painter, but the difference between Agatha Troy and Rhoda is the difference between night and day. Marsh described Troy as the closest of her characters to herself, and squadrons of flying pigs would have darkened the skies over the frozen wasteland of Hell before Agatha Troy ever subsumed her career to that of her husband. I'm a little biased here, because Troy was my favourite in that partnership, but it was a partnership, a union of peers. Rhoda, on the other hand  recounted her life story to someone like this: 

 

Nan heard how Rhoda had very nearly lost James by her own stupidity; how she had refused him because of her painting and then regretted it 

 

Stevenson's willingness and tendency to write demeaningly and patronisingly about women is matched by her enthusiasm for writing panegyrically about male characters. 

Rhoda realised how wrong she was to put her career ahead of marriage, but the men in the story are lauded for putting their work first at all times.

 We are told at length about Duggie’s hidden talents, from his natural flair for drawing and painting to his teaching himself to read, and then doing so voraciously and widely, and then there is this description of his acting ability: 

 

the honours of the evening were undoubtedly Shylock’s. The bent figure in the shabby black gown and the snow white wig was an extraordinarily convincing personality. Duggie did not shout like the other children, his voice was low but clearly audible and he played his part in an unusually sympathetic way. Here was no cringing coward or ranting villain but a dignified and pathetic old man, a man with mistaken ideals but justified in his own eyes for his vindictiveness 

 

I liked Duggie, and was impressed and moved by that passage, but there’s a stark  contrast with one passage in the story that I actually found disturbing  in the brutal frankness with which a character outlined the perceived ideal  ‘end’ for a young female: 

 

he had hoped that school would help her to become more like other girls, to conform to the pattern as it were. … She would either conform to the pattern or else retire into her shell and remain there for the rest of her life. 

 

The idea that conformity is ipso facto the ideal outcome for an adolescent female, with the only other possible outcome being an unhealthy introversion, and that boarding schools are excellent precisely because they exist primarily to impose that conformity was nauseating. 

 

 

The moral of the story is clear: boys are great, and if they get the right help they can grow up to be amazing men, even if they're raised by “stupid” “selfish” women who don't deserve their husbands. A truly wise woman, on the other hand, will realise that marriage should be her ultimate goal and her husband should be the centre of the universe. 

 

This book was written in the 1950s, which is why it is harder for me to excuse the fact that it reeks of attitudes prevalent in the 1850s. In the end, the positives outweigh the negatives: Stevenson's gift for descriptive writing, especially about the landscape that she loved and when she was writing about the characters she clearly had affection for, made the overall experience of right reading this book pleasant. Even though her attitudes toward the roles and place of women in society seem primitive and patronising when compared to those of her contemporary and my compatriot, Marsh.